Tim Robinson’s “Eggman Game” sketch places him in an anonymous office space, a recurring interchangeable setting visible in all three seasons in his Netflix series I Think You Should Leave. As comes with the gig for a corporate cog, he spends his time repeatedly performing a simple task, though the bare-bones computer game in which the player drags eggs from a basket to the gaping maw of a little cartoon eggman has more to do with procrastination than productivity. Once Tim drops “like twenty-five” eggs down the eggman’s gullet, a notification window pops up to announce the successful feeding of six eggs, and after he’s forced to “buy” eighty eggs with unspecified in-game currency, one dragged egg subtracts forty eggs from his grand total. All the while, a pair of coworkers chew him out for not properly utilizing the intra-office channels of communication, as Tim absentmindedly placates them with received white-collar lingo like “you’re a rock star!” When his colleagues step behind his desk to see what’s occupying him, he suddenly wins for no reason, his reward an animation of the eggman’s pubic hair and anus. In Tim’s defense, NSFW is a highly relative term, a rationale he sputters out as “We should be able to w- look at a little porn at work.”
This setup makes metaphor of a tension that unifies many of the segments comprising the nascent cult object, now in its third season as the show claims a seat in sketch Valhalla alongside Mr. Show and The State. To the vast majority of the characters stumbling through social situations with violent ineptness, life feels like a game with obscure objectives, humiliating outcomes, and inscrutable rules that constantly change without reason or warning. Robinson and the writing staff (key among them co-creator Zach Kanin, an Saturday Night Live alum with no good car ideas) favor workplaces and parties for how they pose tests to act normal in front of relative strangers for hours at a time, dictated by elaborate codes of unspoken etiquette most people can take for granted. The stiff, touchy weirdoes portrayed by Robinson and the handful of buddies for whom he’s willing to play straight man — a retinue corralling Will Forte, Fred Armisen, and Tim Heidecker, among other stalwarts of the ‘10s “alt-comedy” scene that’s since eaten the mainstream — cling to their rigid ideas of order as a guide through a confusing world. As anyone with experience in Monopoly can attest, however, nobody likes a stickler. Being right doesn’t matter when we’re all just trying to have a good time.
The natural state of a Robinson character can be triangulated between flabbergasted, flummoxed, and flustered, its symptoms including a strangulated tone of voice and slightly-off stroke-brain speech along the lines of “I thought there was monsters on the world.” Everything about his body language suggests a man holding a lot back; his hunched forward lean, brittle arms pressed to his side, and jerky movements all carry stress that inevitably comes spilling out as he reaches the end of his wits. As a competitor on a faux Price Is Right show (another go-to sketch template oriented around nonsensical regulations), he nearly asphyxiates while wearing a VR headset, gasping that “I don’t know how to work the body” in a pretty good summation of this type’s chronic physical short-circuiting.
These figures of absurd frustration fall apart in response to perceived injustices, low-stakes violations of the almighty societal contract by people with innate understandings of things like extenuating circumstances or taking a bit too far. Robinson mines awkwardness from the lack of this second-nature ability to read a room, coming from personalities with a nuance-free conception of casual interactions. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, video editors on YouTube have already examined I Think You Should Leave as an “autistic text,” a reading echoed on social media.) In the first of breakout utility player Patti Harrison’s appearances, she can’t figure out why her fellow desk jockeys give a polite chuckle to someone else’s lame line about Christmas coming early with the arrival of a new printer, but deal her dead silence when she repeats variations on the same joke until it’s been run into the ground. Someone said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results; around here, it’s more like doing the same thing and expecting the same results, the misplaced belief that interpersonal dynamics can or should be as consistent and replicable as scientific properties.
These black-and-white literalists seek to make The Rules work to their advantage, either by enforcing them in others, or pushing the letter of the law versus its spirit in their own behavior. One instant fan-favorite from the third season sees Robinson attempt to start a “pay-it-forward” chain of goodwill at a fast food drive-thru, but only as a scheme to circle back around so that some sucker has to foot the bill for his colossal order totaling hundreds of dollars. The new episodes open with an ad for a Bill Maher-styled pseudointellectual pundit with a stated policy of going on his phone whenever he can feel himself starting to lose the upper hand in an intellectual tete-a-tete. (The Robinson archetype actually has a lot in common with those “debate me!” people, in their shared belief that their aggressive working of the clock will win them the admiration and respect of their peers instead of just making everyone uncomfortable.) They all operate under the delusion that so long as any odd choice can be proven correct, however technically, its maker will be exempt from all ostracizing.
Alienation is the prevailing fear behind these sweaty, extreme measures, which often reveal themselves to be a counterintuitive grasp for friendship in the midst of loneliness. Guys latch onto any scrap of connection too readily, overeager for bonding through a quick hypothetical-scenario exercise at a team-building presentation or finding a “shirt brother” in a fellow dad at a kid’s school play. The emotional undercurrent of garbled vulnerability surfaces in the text with “Ghost Tour,” which opens with a guide at a haunted house announcing that all present can “say whatever the hell we want” on the late-night tour, a clearance that one doofus takes to heart as he starts blurting profanities harshly clashing with the PG-13 mood. The guide asks him to please be regular and he breaks down in tears, blubbering that “You can’t change the rules just cause you don’t like how I’m doing it.” Having finally exhausted everyone else’s patience, he’s kicked out, returning to his elderly mother’s car. “Make any friends?” she asks. “Not really,” comes his glum reply. In an unexpected note of pathos, we get one quick interior shot of her dashboard, covered with Jesus figurines hot-glued in place while a cheap plastic rosary hangs from the rearview mirror.
That fleeting moment presents a slightly surreal yet realistic glimpse into the interior of one lifestyle that produces the maladjusted, a tacit acknowledgement of the private dramas that sculpt our neuroses and dysfunctions. Robinson ultimately reserves some measure of sympathy for his many floundering misfits — it’s why we’re allowed to laugh at them — and maybe even empathy, coming from an off-center comedian first introduced to America as a talent unable to find his place among the normals at SNL. His farther-out concepts still land in part because we’re able to see at least some of ourselves in the faceplants from people trying far too hard to game out fitting in, an identification that’s fueled the show’s second life in meme form. In most cases, these castoffs are guilty mainly of wanting to be loved, the most mortifyingly human comic premise there is. They’re not pieces of shit. People can change.
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Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.
